Regarding Heaven & Hell

A common question of the skeptic to a Christian is the conundrum of how one can believe in a loving God who “sends” people to hell. I can understand how a person could view this belief as unreasonable. However, if one truly thinks through this matter, one can understand it is not unreasonable at all.

First of all it is not difficult for one to believe in a loving God and heaven. It is when the idea of hell enters the picture that a person begins to question God's love. Now if heaven exists as a place where people who have passed from this earth reside with God in all splendor and majesty it would follow that this place would be a desirable place to be. If there was no hell and all people went to heaven it would follow that heaven would not be "heaven" at all, but simply a new place of existence after death with the same people and problems as life on earth. There certainly would not be peace and harmony if people who were lovers of themselves and not of God were then forced to live with God. This would not be heaven for them.

So for heaven to be a place of harmony with God there must also be a place where there is no harmony with God, for those that refuse to accept harmony with God. If one rejects God would it only stand to reason that they would not want to be in a place of God for all eternity. Would a loving God force them to do so?

Moreover, if we start with the presupposition that God is a loving God what does that look like? Would God be a loving God if He forced people to love Him? He would only have one option that would exclude the necessity of hell. Namely, to create robots who have no freedom, but must obey Him and love Him.

So, what does a loving God do? The only way a loving God can exhibit that love is to allow us to have free will that He does not overpower. He gives us plenty of signs of His love, but He does not force us to accept that love or to love Him back. He does this even though it causes him pain, just like a loving earthly father would be hurt if his child rejected his love. He does all that a loving God can do to love and provide a free way for us to have communion with Him forever. For God so loved the world, that He gave his only begotten son so that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life. (John 3:16) He is always in pursuit of us with His love.

Now you may be objecting that it is unloving for God to dictate that we love Him and have relationship with Him or suffer. However, the truth is that it is good for us to love God. It is our need that is fulfilled when we love Him. We only hurt ourselves when we reject His love. We do not hurt Him. He doesn’t become less God when we reject Him. He doesn’t need our love to sustain Himself. But He loves us and knows that in Him all things have the fullness of life. He is the life giver. In Him is life. When we fight that reality we encounter suffering, death, and trouble in this world because we are living in opposition to how we are designed to live. It’s like a fish trying to live on dry land. It wasn’t designed to do so, plain and simple. The best habitat for a fish is water. The best habitat for humanity is living united with God through an amazing love relationship. But if we refuse it, as we have the freedom to do, we naturally are the fish flopping around on dry land. We lack the necessary components of the fullness of life. Naturally that creates a problem for us. The problems we face on earth due to our separation from Him are there to point us back to Him. For instance, when a child puts his hand too close to a flame, he feels heat and pulls back knowing that to go further would hurt his hand. However, if the child had no pain receptivity, as some have such a rare condition that they feel no pain; he would burn his hand off and not know he was doing it. The pain is a protection to one’s life.

When things aren’t going right, it’s time to look around and find out why. We all have this sense of how things ought to be, and yet we often ignore that sense and think things are as good as it gets. If so, we wouldn’t have this longing for something greater. That desire is there, because that desire has a fulfillment. People try to fill that longing in all kinds of different man made ways. But the only way to fill real longing in one’s heart is through knowing God and coming into His Kingdom.

God gave us free will and man chose to break communion with God and go his own way. Still God provided a way that man could be forgiven and find communion with God again. That way was by sending His own Son, Jesus, who is blameless in every way to pay the price for the sins of mankind.

The Bible says that Jesus, while being God, humbled himself to take human form and even humbled himself to die via crucifixion to pay the price for sins that He did not commit to bridge the divide between God and man. Man need not and cannot work his way back to God. Nor does man need to die for his own sins, but man simply needs to accept that there is nothing he can do to come to God, but to surrender his heart freely and accept God's free and gracious gift of salvation.

Doesn't this sound like a loving God? Just to recap, He gave us free will. We rejected Him. He then sent His Son to die in our place so that we can still enter into the love He has for us if we so choose. And He won't force anyone to have relationship with Him. But He stands at the door of our heart and knocks. He lets us know that He is there, but He won't force the door open. He waits for us to choose to open our heart or close it to Him. The choice is ours, not His. He gave us the choice because He loves us. He desires that none perish, that is His heart, but because He loves us He has to allow us to choose to have life in Him or to perish because our life is not in Him. We can live now with Him forever or we can never live with Him forever. What more could a loving God do to show His great love?

God: Father or Puppeteer?

The debate regarding free will rages within the Church as well as without it. There are those in the faith who maintain that because God is all powerful and all knowing, all that happens in the world is just as He wills it to happen. For example, if someone gets healed, He selected them to be healed. If they stay sick, it is His will that they suffer with that sickness. This is not quite the picture of a loving good God. Moreover, there are those on the outside who also give this argument as evidence that if Christians are indeed serving God, they do not serve a good God.

Whether it is a Christian or a non-Christian arguing that there can be no true freedom if an all powerful all knowing God exists, it still boils down to is God truly a Father or is He merely an all powerful Puppeteer holding all the strings of every life situation?

We have to explore the character and nature of God. In our culture, we often have aversion to authority figures especially that of the father. Many of us cannot relate to the idea of a loving father for in the natural we have not experienced it, and if God is a Father we think Him to be as controlling and demanding as natural authority figures. We think that if He has all power and all knowledge then all that happens is either His fault or He isn’t really all powerful, and, in reality, a figment of our imagination. There is a third option. He is all loving and all powerful, but He restrains His will to give us freedom. Or, rather, He does not impose His will upon us even though He could if it were not against His nature as a loving good Father. His power to assume the strings of our lives is trumped by His lovingly granting us the freedom to exert our own volition.

How could an all powerful and all knowing God be good and not run a utopian society for His people He claims to love? He is capable of creating such a utopian life for the world. Obviously this world is far from utopian. Just the same we desire a life of peace and love. Most of us believe things ought to be better, but where does this ideal “better” come from?

God did create a utopia, an Eden, for humanity. However, instead of maintaining it like a Puppeteer, He provided a Father-child love relationship for humanity. He gave man freedom; and with that gift of freedom came the possibility of walking away from God and consequently, Eden. Man had the ability to choose his own path and he took the path of his choosing which created a separation between man and God for sin entered into man. God being all good and holy has no sin. Man could no longer have the same relationship with God has he previously enjoyed because of his sin.

Our relationship with God is analogous to the union of a man and woman in marriage. They become one, bound tightly together in an intimate relationship. If God were to allow sinful man into this intimate relationship with Him it would be harmful to man because of the extreme holiness of God. God protected mankind by having him exit Eden. This was an act of love. God created man to be in relationship with Him. God desires for man to experience the great expanse of His love and to be trusted with great power and authority in this world. There is a greater reality available to man and it is precisely because of this that man, in the depths of his soul, knows things ought to be different.

Even though man used his freedom in a way that was to his own detriment, God did not give up on His creation. He already had in place the redemption of man. The debt of man to sin is great, but God had set in motion the coming of His own Son as the greatest sacrifice of love in all eternity to pay our debt for us with His sinless life. God demonstrated His continued love for man, by sending His son, while we were yet undeserving sinners--only deserving of the just judgment and eternal separation from God. By the work done on the cross by the Son of God and His resurrection, we can have anew a wondrous relationship with the living God for our sins are forgiven and we are made holy as He is holy. He has cleansed us from all unrighteousness and redeemed us to live a life as heirs with His Son.

God continues to relate to us as a Father and does not usurp our will. We can freely surrender our will to His perfect will or we can hold on to it and go our own path as Adam did. The choice is still ours. We can still freely walk away from His gift of eternal life in Him and the full grand reality of His Kingdom. Or we can trust Him and come under alignment with His perfect Fathering and rest in His love for all eternity.

Can God rule the world with an iron fist and only have His will be done on earth? Yes. Does He do it this way? No. Because He is, by nature, eternally a good Father and good Fathers don’t usurp the will of their children, but they lead gently and show the way by example. He gave us His son as the perfect example of the life available to us. We can choose Him or we can reject Him. The world today is a reflection of a world that is not in alignment with Him. He has given those who are in alignment with Him the authority and the mandate to usher His Kingdom into the world so that that utopia we all desire one day comes to fruition. However, it will only be a utopia to those who are in Him, to those who reject Him they won’t fit in His Kingdom because they cling to their own will over and above the will of the good King who wants them to know His love.

C.S. Lewis puts it best when he said that one day each of us will either tell God “Your will be done” or He will tell us “your will be done.”